Most people have never heard of "Operation Sea-Spray." It might sound like the name of an angsty punk rock band, but this couldn't be further from the truth. It was a 1950 Navy operation that was referred to as a "vulnerability test" — they wanted to identify regions of the country that would be particularly susceptible to a biological terrorist attack.

Officials picked San Francisco as a target, given its proximity to the ocean, its high population, and its dense downtown. With all of these factors, it's easy to understand why they felt the City by the Bay would be a likely target. Over the course of six days in September, bluejackets spewed clouds of Serratia marcescens over SF, a microbe they believed to be harmless, as indicated by a US Navy report,

"...Serratia marcescens is so rarely a cause of illness, and the illness resulting is predominantly so trivial, that its use as a simulant should be continued, even over populated areas..."

It turns out they were wrong. Scientific American refers to the microbe as "sinister." In a statement with the magazine, associate professor of ophthalmology at University of Pittsburgh, Robert Shanks, gives S. marcescens a spot in the "top 10" when talking about causes of hospital-acquired respiratory, neonatal, and surgical infections.

Of course, all of this was unknown back in 1950, when S. marcescens was chosen for its tendency to turn things red. The microbe's dangers were masked by its usefulness as a biological marker — its red pigmentation made it a prime candidate for Operation Sea-Spray.

Leonard Cole is the director of the Terror Medicine and Security program at Rutgers Medical School, and his 1988 book, Clouds of Secrecy, went through many of the events that transpired surrounding the operation in 1950.

"Nearly all of San Francisco received 500 particle minutes per liter. In other words, nearly every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5,000 or more particles per minute during the several hours that they remained airborne."

These volumes are large, but that was insignificant when the distributing party viewed the contents as harmless. As time passed, the Navy's mistake began to unveil itself.

The now-defunct Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco admitted eleven patients in the week following the operation, and they all had strange and severe urinary tract infections which couldn't be treated with antibiotics of the era. According to a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle story, S. marcescens destroyed the heart valves of Edward Nevin, ending with his death.

The experiment wasn't made public until 1976, at which point Nevin's son learned about the true cause of his father's death. His lawsuit would eventually find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, in case Nevin v. United States. The court decided to uphold the decision of the lowers courts, and the United States was not found at fault.

Discover Magazine wrote that the operation was "one of the largest offenses of the Nuremberg Code since its inception, a deplorable betrayal of the of public health and safety, of informed consent and civil liberties," which is particularly unsettling considering how Operation Sea-Spray went underway just three years after the ten points of the code were laid out.

What do you think? Was this a necessary exploration of our nation's vulnerabilities, or did the Navy go too far? Let us know in the comments on Facebook, and be sure to share this with your friends.